DavidGoodman.Net

There’s some great webcomics over at E-Sheep, including the fantastic Guy I Almost Was, a bitingly funny deconstruction of cyberculture.

But I was completely blown away by Spiders, a re-imagining of the Afghanistan war. This is a world where President Gore was elected, and where the US military is experimenting with radically unconventional warfare, dropping web-controlled ’spiders’ across the country so that wired-up teenagers in Ohio can play their mp3 collections to the terrorists, and try to make friends. Follow that up with ecstasy bombs and retro-viruses that target the empathy centres of the brain, and you have a phenomenal piece of near-future science fiction, snappily written, beautifully drawn and strewn with extremely clever uses of HTML and Flash elements.

Too often, webcomics are simply standard three-pane wonders (something that XKCD does very well, and bless ‘em for it), so it’s fantastic to see the limits of the form being extended, while at the same time an amazing, thought-provoking and actually rather affecting story-line is played out, chock full of top-notch SF concepts. Go read.

Bruce Sterling, one of my favourite SF authors, has written a series of vignettes for Wired called Dispatches from the Hyper-Local Future. I can’t work out if this is a one-off, or will be posted regularly (I think the former), but it’s a fantastic bit of flash-fiction mixed with just enough reality to make it zing with authenticity.

Of course, it suffers from hyper-local extrapolation, something that a lot of the post-cyberpunk crowd keep doing - there’s an unspoken assumption that the current Googlemaps37SignalsFlickriPod web 2.0 buzz is some kind of logical kick-off point for ‘the future’, that geotagging and RFIDs and ‘laptop gipsies’ (which Sterling himself has styled himself as in a few of his speeches and writings over the last few years) will become a self-sustaining sub-culture that won’t get eaten up, appropriated or simply fade away.

I suppose it’s an intriguing idea, that the feted cyberculture is finally here, and in many ways, it is - hell, I got married because of Flickr. And good SF often does exactly this, holding a mirror up to the wonders and absurdities of today, revealing them in the twisted funhouse mirror of a ripping yarn, recognisable but accessed from subtly different directions and positions. But at the same time the underlying assumptions behind it are troubling to me.

Consider this:

Torino used to be the “Detroit of Italy,” but some of its derelict Fiat assembly plants have been turned into city-subsidized creative-class hangouts. Big retrofitted lofts, lots of auto-watered greenery, ping-pong tables and massage chairs…. Lots of freeware. You want a bicycle, you just beep at it and take it. Free Italian movies every night, right up on sides of buildings.

In Torino’s cyber-district, you get your basic Euro-trash laptop gypsies, some installation artists, robotics freaks, do-it-yourself makers, raffish free-software fanatics — stir continuously and feed with cheap spaghetti. Result: a classic Euro-bohemian ferment. It’s like a garage sale Ars Electronica that runs all year.

Personally, this sounds awesome, and a very cool place to go and live in (that’s what we want from our futures, right?). But a part of me wonders whether a stories about the subtle barriers to entry to such a glorious techno-Eden would be the more interesting side to read - what happens in Sterling’s glorious future when a tramp wanders in and falls asleep on one of the massage chairs?